Revision as of 23:54, 22 May 2008

dd, sometimes called GNU dd, is the oldest imaging tool still used. Although it is functional and requires only minimal resources to run, it lacks some of the useful features found in more modern imagers such as metadata gathering, error correction, piecewise hashing, and a user-friendly interface. dd is a command line program that uses several obscure command line arguments to control the imaging process. Because some of these flags are similar and, if confused, can destroy the source media the examiner is trying to duplicate, users should be careful when running this program. The program generates raw image files which can be read by many other programs.